A Rose By Any Other Name
by Aurian Lladnek
Summary: Have you ever wondered what happened when they started to grow up? Surely you didn't expect them to remain young forever? Who does Mandy End up with anyways? Of course I hope you know I don't own Grim and Evil or the characters there of.
1. Prologue

Prologue

One would hesitate to call Billy an idiot because it would have been an insult to idiots everywhere. When it came to intelligence he probably couldn't even have put in enough synaptic links to get a combined score in the double digits. If he had been told he had gotten a nine on an IQ test he would have thought he was a genius. Billy still truly believed even in high school that his special education teacher was there to keep the other kids from being jealous of his extreme knowledge. But mother nature wasn't all mean, for all that he lacked in mental capacity, he made up for in looks. He'd gone through a huge growth spurt and time spent mostly as the ball had guaranteed him a place on the football team (his only direction was to knock over as many of the other colored Jerseys as he could though he tended to get confused still and bowl over his own teammates as well.) and that had helped him to bulk out as well as his voracious eating habits which had not changed a bit since his younger days. His nose had not changed a bit but his face had filled out around it and his shocking red hair now hung shaggy under his turned back hat. He was to most girls in the school, their dream come true, their knight in tarnished, food covered armor.

There was one girl who did not see him that way. His closest and strangely most dependable friend was still with him. Mandy had changed little from her early days. She had gone from a dark sinisterly intelligent child to darkly intelligent and sinister teen. She could not have been called pretty. Though her blowing defeat of Mindy in the beauty competition had shown another side to her (and Mindy who, after they made it back from the alternate universe was found to have completely collapsed in on herself; her reason for living having been destroyed when any hope of beating Mandy had ceased. She had gone on that way for quite some time before quietly moving to Canada. It was said that she had found herself there and become a Nun.) But she never showed that side again after it's earlier devastating effects. The best she could have hoped for was to be called striking. After all she did warrant a second look for here was a girl with pretty blond hair and bright sunny pink dress with the darkest scowl one could have never have imagined looking you down with the fires of Hades in here eyes. She had grown. That could be admitted. She was tall now, not too tall mind you, but tall enough to be intimidating if you got on her bad side which many of them did. That is not to say that she was evil but merely that she was a big fish in the tiny pond that was Endsville and they just kept running into her somehow.

Oh she had had her share of boyfriends to be sure. She had dated Irwin for a time if only to have a willing slave but found that it was not the same as bossing around Billy who was too stupid to get that she was being mean or Grim who hated it and voiced this hatred loudly. Later she had even tried her hand with Spurge and had easily talked him into sharing seventy percent of his bullying profits with his beloved girlfriend after she threatened to go public with the fuzzy bunny undies she had found in his drawer. In time their own time she had kicked each and every one of those so called love sick swine to the curb though some she had kept in their blackmailing bonds in case she ever had need of them again.


	2. Chapter 1

Chapter One

Dear Dark Journal,

This week was like any other week. Billy led his new fawning girlfriend

'Sue Ellen' and the rest of the idiotic school on a full scale

cleansing of the city from it's unholy reign of terror under the

control of clowns. Everyone who didn't want to be pelted or soaked

wisely shoved tangelloes up their noses or held them in their hands

(more wisely as the others had a tendency to end up in the hospital

to have them surgically removed from their nasal cavities) so as not

to incur the wrath of the might Billgor, destroyer of clowns. One

poor mime, mistaken for a clown was run up the school flagpole by his

black and white striped briefs. The week ended with school being

closed for the remainder of the month for drying out after the pool

flooded when a tangelloe got stuck in the cleaning system. The wave

coming from the school when the glass doors broke, flooded out a

whole section of town, sending the rich families scurrying to their

winter estates in France to deal with the emotional damage with their

well trained servants in tow. As for the rest of us, we had been

enjoying, or rather surviving our time off. Billy has since moved on

to discover (twice I might add) that you cannot eat the legs off of

living frogs and now believes that the toilet in his house is haunted

by the ghost of a small squirrel.

But what of me? I can hardly say journal. I don't feel like my dark,

antagonistic self of late. The symptoms? I'm not quite sure. I

suppose I noticed it after I didn't ask Grim to do my chores for me

this weekend. I made Qwinlin do it instead but it's the point of

the thing. I always make Grim do them because I get such enjoyment

out of watching him suffer but it's different somehow. Oh, he still

hates it just as much as always and the way Saliva Jr buries him just

like his father did still gets him going but I just don't get

anything out of it now. It's almost like there's some little

voice in my head telling me that what I'm doing is wrong except I

know I'm not developing a concience because it's still funny to

me to see Billy get his head caught in the cat door and then watch

someone not notice and open the door or to see Milkshakes III get

stuck up the tree and have Billy chase it just like he did in

younger days. No, it must be Grim's fault for I know it is not mine

journal. I have not changed... have I? Of course not.


	3. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Years went by. Billy who could not have passed high school let alone college without help had gotten dibs on Grim and had taken him along under the guise of a classroom skeleton (again) to get help in cheating. He had made it into one college (barely) on a football scholarship. It took him ten attempts to finally get a hold of Mandy over the phone and after the last trial ending up with Grim (mistaken for Billy) getting beaten up by a tough biker for calling his girl Mandy over the phone, Grim insisted he would dial. It was no surprise when he found that Billy had no idea how to dial or understand the numbers in a phone id and after that there was far less trouble (at least with phone calls that is). Grim missed Mandy as much as one could miss abject malice but that he found he could have stood but now without her dark banter there was nothing to take away from the mindless drivel that was Billy and given the choice between dark malevolence and shear stupidity he found he would have preferred the former. He was after all the Grim Reaper. He enjoyed being on the causing end of such unwanted pain and agony and he found he had a grudging respect for her wit and something else. He couldn't quite put his bony finger on it but there was something else missing that seemed to illude him constantly now that Mandy was out of the picture.

It wasn't that he missed her, he assured himself almost constantly. It was that it would be in his best interest to get in good with her so he wouldn't end up as a hang up dummy in Billy's house for the rest of his life. How was that girl anyhow? On the phone she said very little and she sounded far more reserved when she talked to him then when he heard her sarcastically making fun of Billy when he 'accidentally' forgot to return the earpiece to it's cradle sometimes. It wasn't that he longed to hear her voice, no, of course not. It was that he wanted to protect his assets incase Billy said something stupid...er then usual. He knew very little about what was really going on in her life. He gained very little insight into it from his hijacked conversations overheard on the phone or the irregular postcards Billy forced her to send. She was going through law school, well that fit her well. She was shrude and could go far with such a degree and until then she could torment the poor victims that had the misfortune of being on the opposite side of a case. She would of course be a prosecutor, there was no question of that in Grim's mind whatsoever. He could not, and he believed no one else who had ever been in a room for more then five minutes with her would either, see Mandy defending someone else's rights. Still, it maddened him that he could find no more about her. Was she dating anyway? Where had that question come in? Why would that matter? Now really, all he wanted to know was whether or not she would save him from life as a mannequin. Right?


	4. Chapter 3

Just a reminder-I DO NOT OWN THE GRIM ADVENTURES SERIES.

Chapter 3

Billy had finally been kicked out of college by reason of mental defect (the drinking out of the toilets might have been part of it but it was more about the fact that he tended to talk to his life size skeleton mannequin during class incessantly and was beginning to scare some of the students with rumors that it could really talk. It was decided after he returned home to live with his family and take over his old man's job of doing... well whatever it was his father did do all day, that is would be best if Grim be sent to live with Mandy who was finishing up her last year at a prestigious law school and would be less likely to try to sell pieces of him for more candy. Unfortunately, Billy had a hard time letting go and so had the 'bright' idea to send Grim in pieces through the mail. 'That way it's like you're only half gone!' he explained in his plain Billy way. He started with the feet. By the time his head finally made it-his jaw went first so he was stuck mute and bodiless for a month- Mandy had finally graduated at the top of her class and had been hired by a large township as one of the junior prosecutors. Now it is not the custom for new lawyers to be given big cases or cases of any kind for that matter as they are usually given understudy work and the job of the sidekick for a few years to get their feet wet in the world of law but someone-a mysterious benefactor from high up on the food chain, refered to only as HIM-had decided to let her try her teeth on a murder case involving a young woman who had tortured and killed a man in what seemed cold blood. It was a text book case she was told. The evidence was all there. The blood stains on the woman's dress from that night, no alibi, the weapon found at the bottom of the pool had been registered to her father.

It should have been open and shut. In fact it was open and shut until she read Grim's name journal which had accidentally been left with her when she and Billy had gone their separate ways. The journal listed the date and time of each death the reaper had been at for each day. Being magical of course, it was set to show only the city in which the book was located at the moment and the book could not lie. It was written in the person's own blood after all. She wouldn't have thought of it, wouldn't have even noticed it most likely if it hadn't been for the fact that there had only been two other deaths that day and both were of no consequence an old woman who had died in her sleep and a young man from a gang who had 'accidentally' fallen down an elevator shaft onto bullets. It should have been obvious to find the man's name but it just wasn't there. So, if one thought of it logically the man could not possibly be dead. However there was a dead body lying around out there and it was most definitely the victim all had assumed because an autopsy had been done, tests had been taken, and the body had been identified by family. Plus the woman swore she hadn't killed him though that wasn't unusual.

Oh well, Mandy was not about to worry about so trivial a thing as someone being innocent and yet being on trial. She went on with her work and set up a great prosecution. The first few days of the trial went well. The defense had nothing other then their client's say so that she was innocent. Their ship was sinking fast and Mandy was going to ride the wave made from it to success. It was on the day before the last day of the trial that Grim's head finally arrived at long last. It came in a box that looked as though it had gone through a paper shredder and then left with a dog for a week. It wasn't until she kicked it in coming into her apartment that she even noticed it. It might have been the pain in her foot (did she even feel pain?) or it might have been the muffled yelp that came from the box. Since it wasn't a puppy it had to be Grim. Mandy brought him in and after taking a shower, eating dinner, working on the case, and watching tv, she got around to opening it.

'It's about time ya open that box chil... Oh dear, I must hav' ben sent ta the wrong address. Forgive me child but please don' start screamin at the talkin' head and just get me a phone would ya? I need to get a hold o' Mandy.'

'I am Mandy you numb skull. Who else do you think would have kept your old bag o' bones for you if it wasn't me? She pointed at the boxes strewn around the room, still unopened and some being used as tables to hold papers and food boxes.

'What've ya done to mah body! It's been left apart so long it probably'll never pull it's self together correctly. And oh the ache I feel in my rib cage. Where be it girl?' Mandy pointed and he knew why when he saw it. A giant stack of file folders had the box nearly squished to the floor. It took the rest of the night to put Grim back together with much whining from him and threats to quit if he said one more word from her. But finally it was done, and they sat down in the living room. 'So have ya been child. You've really grown up since I saw you last. Before you were something of a wilted flower and now you look beautiful. Well, ya could smile more howeva.''

'I don't smile. Smiling is for imbeciles and buffoons. Tell me about your life how has it been with Billy.'

'Oh you know how it is. Eris comes and turns us into strange creatures like before or dumps water on him. Scar moved out last week from next door. I guess he's moving to Alaska. Says it's for his own sanity. Keeps muttering under his breath something about Billy and planting the seeds of catastrophe and doom. He always was an interesting character. Anyway, your old boyfriend Has Delgato has been by again. He finally escaped from that big foot incident we left him in. And of course Puddin is nowhere to be found. We think he might have finally been eaten by that mad rabbit that kept saying it loved him to 'death.'


End file.
